Documentary film as memory/memento mori in Aslaug Holm’s Brothers (Brødre)

Seeing documentary film as an object for remembering and resurrecting the past is a complex issue touching upon questions pertaining to the ontology of photographic capturing, its ways of becoming an index, means of reinventing/fabricating the past through narrative and how such shared, cultural conventions impinge on the personal sphere, i.e. the singularity and authenticity of the experience preserved. While some past and present key media theorists regard such cinematization of memory as either a reduced or falsified form of pastness, I argue, employing Edward S. Casey’s influential phenomenological study of mnemonic modes and taking Aslaug Holm’s (auto)biographical documentary Brothers (Brødre, 2015) as an outstanding example, that documentary as an object perceived by a specific (not abstracted) consciousness is multiple and functions as a virtual reservoir for potential complex acts of memory to occur – it enlivens, not reduces one’s engagement with the past. Brothers is seen as both a form of reminiscence vehicle and commemoration vehicle. I furthermore identify a new mode of memory manifest in the film, not discussed by Casey, and its related object – anterior reminding and memento mori – which preserves the past and alludes to the future, this way determining what that past shall have been.